Pretty cool
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https://twitter.com/LeoLabs_Space/status/1619057013992071168
https://twitter.com/LeoLabs_Space/status/1619057025010532352
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Starship flight test going off in 30 minutes!
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We go again in a few days.
We go agane:
Holding. Fingers crossed for SpaceX employees. Not including Musk.
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Insprucker said something like “beginning to flip for stage separation” right when the rocket started to tumble, which made it sound like they were going to do some sort of flip maneuver before separation? But surely that can’t be right, can it? The plan must have been to flip the booster only, right?
It sounds like there is a maneuver before separation but that wasn’t 100% clear to me either.
It matches what I saw in the live shot. They are saying 3 were out.
I have to admit this shit still gets my pulse up. The rotation at the end, I was oh no shit.
That was pretty fucking awesome, I’m not gonna lie.
Seems like something went pretty wrong with the engines… They were only doing 674 kph at 1 minute, which works out an average of 0.32 g for the first minute. But 1.3 TWR seems really low even at liftoff, and obviously should be climbing from there.
There’s nothing holding the stages together so the plan for stage separation is for the booster to basically fling the Starship off like it’s a tennis ball in one of these things
Stage separation has always been tricky for SpaceX.
Liftoff took forever, seemed like the rocket stack didn’t start moving up until well after T=0.
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If 5 engines of 33 were out and the TWR at liftoff is supposed to be 1.5 (Google) then 28/33*1.5= 1.3 so your numbers seem reasonable. But idk, few of my rockets went anywhere.
From video
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It’s interesting that the LOX seems to be depleting faster than the CH4. Perhaps whatever took out the engines also caused a LOX leak? You can see a bunch of extraneous flames in the exhaust plume, which would be consistent with the fuel-rich exhaust hitting a bunch of leaked oxygen.
Idk exactly what that display is showing. The mixture is 3.6:1 CH4 to O2 according to wiki. I guess % of total? It’s also easy to see things sometimes. Like during ascent, there was some image distortion where I thought it was wobbling before I realized, oh, heatwaves or whatever.
We shall see, but at 2:02…:
Right before termination, you can also see that LOX bar go to zero and the engines appear to cut out shortly before they blow it up. Makes sense that they would want to keep the engines firing as long as possible to get more data.
I think the range safety officer is going to do his thing as soon as it’s clear something unrecoverable is going on. The LOX bar also dipped relatively quickly when the announcer said they were going to throttle down and back up so maybe the mixture is part of the throttling mechanism? IDK anything about liquid engines. Just guessing.
After liftoff the announcer also said “first stage engines nominal” so maybe they planned to launch without all 33 engines operating?
The announcer claiming things were nominal was clearly not paying attention to or not talking about the engines getting taken out by debris from the launchpad. My guess is that the speed was still within acceptable values and that is what he was focusing on. That launchpad needs some serious redesign before the next attempt.